Chronic Profit: Building Your Small Business While Managing Persistent Pain

By Alison Tedford

How are you supposed to “hustle” when you hurt all the time? Are you suffering from growing pains in your business and ongoing pain in your life? If you’re struggling to run a business while dealing with pain, you’re not alone. Chronic pain affects 1 in 5 people and while it can be a challenge, it doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. Your journey will just look different.

In Chronic Profit: Building a Business While Managing Persistent Pain, you will learn how to use this simple but effective framework to grow your business even when pain presents.

You’ll learn to:
• Systematize, simplify and delegate
• Reframe your limitations, reimagine your processes, and refuel with self-care
• Release guilt, embrace tough feelings and find joy

You’ll also hear from entrepreneurs just like you about how they make things work when their body has other plans. Learn from a Future of Work thought leader about how you can leverage advances in technology and work culture to get more done and build a company you can be proud of even when you feel like the odds are stacked against you.

The message in this comprehensive resource for business owners with chronic pain is that you can do it, and you aren’t alone. You don’t have to “hustle” or “grind” to make Chronic Profits. There’s a better way and this book will help you find it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Self-Counsel Press
• Release date: May 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781770405226

Alison Tedford

Alison Tedford is a former public servant turned business consultant who has a wealth of experience in culturally sensitive policy analysis, cross-cultural communication, and education on social issues. An advocate for health and mental health, and also Indigenous issues, she has written many articles for publications like CBC, Al Jazeera, and Today’s Parent. She is the author of Chronic Profit, another Self-Counsel Press title.

Book preview

Preface: How and Why I’m Here

We can’t let people keep dying out of politeness.

I wrote those words on May 7, 2020, on my Facebook page in frustration and devastation at another Black life lost. We were in the initial social isolation period everyone called quarantine and amidst the eerie quiet, Black people were still being killed by police and I had something to say about it.

I wasn’t always loud like this in my business. I started my marketing practice without a specific point of view. It didn’t have strong positioning in any respect other than that I created quality content, but over the course of quarantine I came into my own. I said what I felt needed to be said and it turned into both social change and client attraction.

Businesses were closing. People were crying and baking bread. I was a newly single mom, an entrepreneur with a struggling business that refused to give up. Corona took half my business the first week it hit, and I was devastated. I was worried I was going to become homeless. My long-term partner had just left and my business was imploding and I didn’t know what the heck to do.

Going into that phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, I knew my life was never going to be the same because my family had dissolved, and it changed me. I was never going to be the same person that I was. And then all of a sudden, a virus ravaged Earth, and everybody was tossed into the same new lack of routine, lack of certainty, lack of anything that was familiar that I had become somewhat accustomed to over the course of a number of weeks.

So, I started sharing my deepest thoughts on Facebook under the hashtag #nofakebooking, and we share the messages we need the most. I was something of a pandemic Pollyanna (I even bought the domain pandemicpollyanna.com) and I just started writing. I started pouring my heart out to the people who were in my world about the things that mattered to me. I wrote about Black lives. I wrote about Trans lives. I wrote about all of the things that were in my heart.

I started a community gratitude practice with daily check-ins where people would share about their days and how they were making it through.

My community and I bonded over the shared experience of a pandemic and how it affected our personal lives, our romantic lives, our business lives.

After all, it touched everything. But a funny thing happened. When it touched my life, everything grew. The chaos of this deadly virus and these horrible circumstances stabilized my business and made it grow. I was the calm, consistent, reassuring, hopeful but authentic voice my community needed to normalize what they were feeling. People got to know me — the real me.

I wrote a love letter to my community.

My Quarantine Life Project

I’m not planning to learn Spanish.

I won’t be making sourdough.

I’m a copywriter. Every day I write things to convince people to buy the course, book the meeting, schedule the keynote, ditch the diets, make all sorts of changes.

I only sell things I believe in because I believe I’m good at what I do, and I only want to use it for good.

Words of Persuasion are my superpower.

My Quarantine Life project is to sell something a little different to you.

I’m determined to convince you to keep going (even though it’s hard).

I want you to believe you’re not alone (even if you’re isolated).

I would love to see you exercise self-compassion and leave space for the big feelings (even when it’s scary).

I would be so happy for you to feel validated and understand that whatever you’re feeling right now is OK (even when it feels like a lot).

I want you to understand it’s reasonable to not be OK, but I don’t want it to overwhelm you completely (even when life gets really heavy).

I want to assure you that subscribing to diet culture will only make the space you have for joy smaller (even when people try to scare you about The Quarantine 15).

My goal is to keep showing up for you until you believe those things and until you buy into you, because I believe in you.

What is your quarantine life project?

I have immense survivor guilt about this: I know how many businesses didn’t have the experience of thriving during a pandemic. But that was my experience. That was my truth. I lost almost everything in my business, and I stabilized it and I doubled my monthly pre-COVID revenue after so many years of going through the motions, keeping the lights on, and hoping something big would happen. A few months later it would triple.

I wanted my business to grow, but I didn’t wish for the painful circumstances in which it ended up thriving.

After so many years of being behind the scenes, I became visible. I appeared on CBC Radio five times one day. I spoke on a panel about how to raise antiracist kids to hundreds of people. I was on global public radio about race-based data and Indigenous people and how they’ve been left behind by the healthcare system. I was on podcasts. I spoke anywhere people would listen and probably places people didn’t.

I got really loud and people started paying attention. I also started listening really hard. I heard my fellow business owners complaining about how they didn’t know how to talk to their communities about what was happening around them.

I watched icons get cancelled because of their ineffective responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. I saw people struggling with how to sell with sensitivity in a difficult time. People were confused, lost, and scared.

My natural instinct as a mom and nurturer was to comfort, to educate, and to reassure.

These questions that people had were all questions that I felt prepared to answer because of my extensive experience with intercultural communication in government, and my experience managing communities online, doing antiracism education to foster understanding and reduce systemic barriers. My experience as an Indigenous woman who has done all of these things had me perfectly positioned to be able to serve people who desperately needed serving.

When I tried to do antiracism education work informally while maintaining marketing practice, I found I was exhausted. Keeping those two pieces separate and maintaining them with the same level of fervor was depleting my already low energy.

After all, I was working really hard through the pandemic trying to keep the lights on and at the same time carrying an immense emotional weight trying to explain the experience of racism and I couldn’t hold those two things separately. I needed to be able to bring them together in order to function. And that’s how Stay Woke Not Broke, my first group program, was born.

My Story: In the Beginning

This is probably the most unexpected escape from prison story you will ever read, but here goes.

Entrepreneurship does not run in my family and as it turns out, I ran from the very thing my family always did, which was work in the prisons. I did a sixth grade project on substance abuse programming in the prison system and didn’t think much of it. It was where my dad, my stepmom, my uncle, and my aunt worked. Later, my cousin, my stepbrother, and I would join also. It was what we did.

Looking back, I don’t think I knew anybody who ran a business when I was growing up. This was so far outside of my plan it’s almost laughable that I ended up here. Growing up I thought maybe I would become a lawyer or a psychologist, but things didn’t turn out that way.

I thought my path was pretty much preordained when I got my first government job. I figured I had a career for life and the idea that I would be working from home designing national campaigns, working with brands and business owners all over the world, all from the comfort of my own living room never entered my mind.

I didn’t have a degree in anything. I had a year of assorted college courses that together didn’t amount to very much. I didn’t feel like I had any of the ingredients to build a successful business. I didn’t have a big idea. I just had a longing inside me to make something happen and I didn’t even know what it was.

I wanted to change the world, but I didn’t know where to start or if business could have anything to do with that. I didn’t even have a business plan or a website or Facebook page. This never should have worked but it did.

A Good Dream, but Not My Dream (Leaving Government)

I started working in government when I was 18. I started in the Federal Treaty Negotiation Office doing clerical work and moved into working in the department that handled residential school claims where I would stay for a few years. Later I transferred to work in the prison system while I worked my way up from being a secretary to be a project officer specializing in Performance Measurement, Policy, Planning, Access to Information, and Privacy.

I had what so many people wanted, and I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of room for upward mobility when I got where I was at 32 and it was an uncomfortable feeling to feel like there wasn’t much more than that for me to achieve. I felt stuck, like I peaked too early, and then what was I supposed to do?

I struggled with the antiquated Human Resources policies and internal hiring practices that made me jump through the same hoops over and over again to prove my disability and wait to see if my required accommodation would be honored.

Everybody connected to the process had the very best of intentions but there just wasn’t a structure in place that made advancement as unencumbered as it is for people who don’t have a disability. It felt so hard to get ahead and I was demoralized.

I struggled with long-term temporary opportunities that didn’t translate to job security. Those situations meant that when the payroll system went haywire a large proportion of income could be at risk of not arriving. That wasn’t a risk I was prepared to accept.

As the primary breadwinner in my home I needed to know that my money would arrive as scheduled in full. If I wasn’t going to have that stability, I wanted the instability to be on my own terms.

Beyond the financial concerns, I found myself trying to solve the same problems over and over again and while there was progress it was discouraging and frustrating and a large ship to turn. I longed to work in a nimble organization that could easily implement strategic direction and change course with more ease than a government entity.

It’s not that there was no desire for change, I worked with brilliant, kind, compassionate, amazing humans who wanted the very best. Nobody was nefariously opposing progress. But systems are hard to change. We were all people with the best of intentions trying to do the very best thing that we could within the constraints of what was possible. It just wasn’t enough for me at the time.

When I joined the government, I was an idealist and I thought that I could change things from the inside and to be fair, I believe that a lot of the things that I did created meaningful change. I watched others do the same.

I just longed for something more. I didn’t know what